Airship Dreams
It seems like many of my ideas for blog posts come from finding mysterious family photos that, once researched, yield insight into things I knew very little about. Today’s post originated with a photo of my grandmother’s family standing in front of a large pile of debris. I had no idea what to make of this image, but I was certainly curious about it.
Every Family Has a Maverick, Part 1
Every family has a maverick (or two), and one of my family’s mavericks was my great-great-great-grandfather Walter White Collins. Walter was born in Guernsey County, Ohio, in 1838 and moved with his family to Lineville in south central Iowa around 1855. In 1857, Walter, then 19 years old, married Elizabeth Paul, and settled on a small farm next to those owned by his father and two older brothers. He and Elizabeth had two children over the next few years, and had it not been for the Civil War, that might well have been the end of his story.
The Motherlode of Erismans
I have an unusual last name. For much of my life, I never met anyone named Erisman to whom I wasn’t closely related, close enough that we could easily calculate what flavor of cousin we were. Some years back, however, while visiting Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, on a business trip, I was suddenly inundated by Erismans—a colleague’s child’s kindergarten teacher, a local car dealership, the high school’s star quarterback smiling from a billboard. There were Erismans everywhere, even on a road sign. I had, I concluded, found the motherlode of Erismans.
An Actual Privateer
When I decided on the title for this blog, I was shooting for alliteration, of course, but also for a representation of my family’s past. Pioneers and preachers we have in abundance, but there really were some privateers as well. Here’s what I have learned about one of them.